[PeterHartley]

I’ve suggested that audio feedback is really worth considering on another forum but it’s worth repeating myself!

There is a JISC introduction to the idea at:

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/audio-feedback

But I think this and the accompanying ‘how to’ guide is out of date and there are a number of  different ways of doing it nowadays. This has prompted me to try to find a more up-to-date account. I have found that ocTEL is very good at giving me new things to do!

[PeterHartley]

If you want to consider other technologies that might also be useful then I think you should consider how you might incorporate audio and video in your feedback.

There is a fair bit of evidence that audio feedback can be very useful as it allows you to give much more and more personal feedback in the same time as a tutor – this is my own experience and there are studies which back me up.

For the use of video you might want to look at the work of James McDowell from Huddersfield – http://www.jamesmcdowell.com/Epigeum/ . A very different subject area but the idea of commenting directly on students’ visual productions could be adapted to your area.

Some years ago I was associated with postgraduate work in Design where we replaced the traditional paper-based portfolio with an assessment where students has to present their ‘design story’ within the constraint of 6 Powerpoint slides (using the notes field for personal reflections). Students found this very demanding but much more satisfying than the ‘bung everything in’ strategy many of them applied to conventional portfolios. I don’t know how (or whether) they have updated this approach to use different technologies.

 

[PeterHartley]

Sorry about this.

Another useful source is Drew’s blog: http://anarchiceducator.wordpress.com

Unfortunately Drew’s own link to Information Obesity in this blog is also broken so I’ll chase him to see what is happening. I think he is still out of the UK at the moment on a study visit so that might explain the problem.

 

 

[PeterHartley]

Institutional issues and barriers have been really important in my experience as well. When I ran an educational development unit, developing a good relationship with the IT Services staff was a priority for me. This can work very well if you demonstrate that you appreciate their issues and constraints. But this does take time. From an academic tutor’s perspective I think you need make your educational development unit/team aware of what you are trying to do and see if they will act as ‘go-between’ to get software installed. For example, we managed to get cmap (free) and mind genius (not free) installed on the network and then it only needed one email a year to keep this updated.

[PeterHartley]

Sorry, Alice, for this glitch, and thanks for pointing this out. I’ve substituted the video you recommend while we investigate what happened to the original resource and whether it’s available anywhere else.

[PeterHartley]

The text above had bullets to separate the responses to each question until I hit the submit button so here they are again to make them more readable:

We are mainly interested in education (over 50%) and then Business/Management (22%) and then a spread of other subjects but no Engineers or Mathematicians (from Question 1) 

We only make occasional use of resource banks like Jorum and none of us see them as ‘essential’ (Q2) 

We have mixed experience of MOOCs with many of us having no previous experience (42%) but only Coursera has seen many users (27%) (Q3) 

We have used OER occasionally (19%) or are aware of them but not yet used them (31%). Only 11% of us have used them to make significant changes to our teaching while 19% have not used them and do not know much about them. (Q4) 

We have not used Creative Commons (38%). For those who have the most common option is Attribution (CC BY) (Q5) 

We are very disparate in our use of tools. We do not use any of the tools we listed ‘all of the time’. Only one tool got more than a single response here – videocasts – but they are also one of the least used overall. The most popular tools in regular use are screencasts (35%) and mind maps (31%); the least used at the moment are GloMaker (88% never used), Xerte (68%), concept maps (69%), screencasts (42%), mind maps (38%) and videocasts (36%). (Q6)

Now please discuss!

Peter

 

[PeterHartley]

RE Groupwork

You might also want to look at a small book for students which I put together with Mark Dawson (we were both involved with the LearnHigher initiative) and there are some resources on the accompanying website which you can download:
http://www.palgrave.com/pocketskills/groupwork/

This is an area I used to teach – drop me an email if you want further suggestions.

There is also a chapter on groups in the book which came out of the LearnHigher CETL and which we mentioned in the webinar,

Best wishes
Peter

[PeterHartley]

Interesting argument, John. I am not yet convinced by Prezi from the audience’s perspective. I’ve seen a number of presentations using it and only one or two really seemed to benefit from the way the interface works. Otherwise it seemed to be ‘Powerpoint with seasick transitions’. Incidentally, I’m not a great fan of Powerpoint as some operations just are not as smooth as they should be. I’ve not come across a systematic comparison of Powerpoint and Prezi – has anyone got one out there?

Peter.

[PeterHartley]

Maybe involving your learners in the regular exploration and dissemination would be a productive teaching strategy?

This is one of the things that seems to be useful in the Dynamic Learning Maps project at Newcastle which might interest you.

Best wishes

Peter

 

[PeterHartley]

Really interesting post but you left me a bit confused. You seem to have found quite a lot of stuff you might be able to use – in which case, why ‘hate’ the activity? Is there a way of making it less frustrating? Maybe this is something to raise in the webinar (especially as we have one speaker from Jorum)

Best wishes

Peter

 

[PeterHartley]

I think you have both highlighted some of the issues in finding ‘good resources’ which you can immediately use with students. Unfortunately I don’t think there is an easy answer to speed up searching for the ‘gems’. Maybe there will be some suggestions on this coming out of the webinar.

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